This is one of the most comprehensive efforts to document what residents are experiencing everyday in public housing on an individual level.

As a result, this survey identified important findings regarding NYCHA conditions on physical and mental health, as well as management responsiveness and building conditions.

The injustice of the health impacts on the people living in public housing cannot be overstated. Buildings can be restored. Thousands of privately-owned buildings which were uninhabitable in the 1970s and 1980s in New York are now fully renovated, safe, and healthy places to live. But a person’s health cannot be so easily restored. Neurological damage from lead poisoning will affect children their entire lives. Respiratory impacts from living long-term with mold or asbestos can be debilitating well beyond when these conditions are remediated. The mental health impacts from the trauma of these housing conditions can stay with people for years. The extent of the health impacts on people as a condition of living in NYCHA found by this survey, as well as other experiences documented by residents, are incredibly disturbing, and a debt to the people affected that cannot be repaid.

“The living conditions in NYCHA buildings are simply inhumane,” says Vernell Robinson, Community Voices Heard board member and a NYCHA resident. ​“The toxic environment is destroying the health of our communities, which are largely Black and Brown residents. We’ve been speaking out about our plight for years - decades - and NYCHA management just doesn’t seem to care. We are proud to have conducted this survey and worked with RPA on this important report exposing the truth about NYCHA living conditions. NYCHA can no longer turn a blind eye to this blatant injustice. I am committed to ensuring that the voices of public housing residents are heard and that we get the care we deserve.”

The surveys in this report were done over the course of 2018, and this report was finalized in February of 2020 - just before the current COVID-19 pandemic hit. It is now obvious that COVID-19 greatly exacerbates the negative health effects, especially respiratory effects, already experienced by many NYCHA residents due to dilapidated building and apartment conditions.

While there is a lot we still don’t know about COVID-19, we do know several things: COVID-19 is more dangerous to the elderly, people with pre-existing health conditions, and people living in environments which can cause respiratory issues. These populations are all disproportionately represented in NYCHA. The severity of COVID-19 also reflects existing inequities - RPA’s own research has shown that deaths from COVID-19 are highly correlated with communities of color.

Over the course of 2018, several CVH members engaged in an extensive door-to-door survey documenting health and living conditions. This effort reached more than 700 people across 35 buildings in five developments in the Rockaways, and residents spent over 400 hours in this effort. This is just one example of the time and effort residents have gone through in order to bring attention to the deteriorating conditions and their effects on the everyday lives of people who live in NYCHA.

The findings are stark:

• 81 percent of residents need immediate repairs to their apartments, with more than half needing bathroom repairs and 45 percent needing kitchen repairs.
• One-quarter of residents say that living conditions directly affect their physical health, with residents experiencing conditions ranging from asthma and other respiratory issues to central nervous system problems and chronic fatigue.
• One-third say that living conditions directly affect their mental health, adding greatly to stress, depression, and other issues.

Building conditions

Management Responsiveness

Physical and Mental Health

Fundamentally, NYCHA residents simply need the same things as residents of all other housing: homes and buildings in good repair, and safe and healthy living conditions. At this point, however, it will be a major effort to achieve these standards. Virtually every public housing building needs a comprehensive renovation requiring significant investment. RPA, CVH, and several other organizations have suggested paths toward financing and effecting this larger effort, including calling for each level of government to work together to fully fund NYCHA repairs.

However, more immediate reforms can also be done. Residents have a right to management that is punctual, respectful, and responsive.

In addition to the survey in the Rockaways, CVH’s roundtables and organizing meetings found numerous issues with the way NYCHA approaches its complaint system, property management, and capital planning.

Complaint Systems

NYCHA’s centralized call system, covering more than 400,000 residents across five boroughs, is clearly not working from a resident perspective.

More autonomy and responsiveness at the local level is greatly needed, with training and dispatch authority given to individual developments. When CVH toured the NYCHA call center, they noted that frustration is not just on the residents’ part, but that not being able to direct people to correct services and help improve conditions also leads to a great deal of frustration on the part of call center employees.

The inability to get responses to emergency conditions is also a large problem with the system. Residents noted that the centralized complaint center was not able to handle emergencies well, and that access to the emergency NYCHA service line was not made available to all residents.

Doubly frustrating is that NYC already has a professional complaint system for city services with the 311 system. This is the service used for all other housing complaints in NYC, and also helps document and analyze issues.

Siloing NYCHA from the 311 service does a disservice both to NYCHA residents and NYC overall.

One bright spot has been the MyNYCHA app.

NYCHA does have two in-person drop-in centers, one near Fordham Road in The Bronx and one near Atlantic Center in Brooklyn. However, the survey showed that these were not well known or utilized - likely because very few people in NYCHA live near these centers. Only 616 NYCHA apartments, or 0.4 percent of the total, are within a 10-minute walk of one of the drop-in centers. Only 6,363, or 3.7 percent of all NYCHA apartments, are within a 20-minute walk.

With a move toward a less centralized complaint system, there are some aspects of the current system which are important and should be retained. These include the documentation of the complaint with registered ticket number, and a uniform experience in customer service - albeit a much better experience than currently exists.

Property Management

The first steps to better property management is believing residents’ reports of needed repair, and respecting residents’ time and schedules.

If a problem is reported, the first person to respond should be someone who can fix the problem as reported. Instead, residents report that NYCHA will often send someone first to validate a problem. This is not only inefficient and costly, it is insulting.

Residents also point to very little advance notice is given to residents for scheduling repairs, in some cases as short as next-day notice. This results in an inability to take off work or rearrange other obligations in order to be home for a repair appointment. Residents also report a disconnect between the call centers and the property management offices. Oftentimes, the window of time given for an appointment by the call center is not communicated to or not accepted by the management office. This results in missed appointments, which are blamed on residents not giving access, or continual rescheduling resulting in even more time needed to be taken off from work or other obligations.

NYCHA also needs to do more on providing better language access for non-English speakers in developments, and invest in a management training and evaluation system that prioritizes respect for residents.

Capital Planning and Repairs

Every five years, NYCHA is required to do a comprehensive Physical Needs Assessment (PNA) detailing conditions in each development and the cost of their repair. Although the PNA is on the website, it is not broadly advertised or understood. The first step to trust is transparency, especially when it comes to the conditions of individuals’ homes. Individual documentation of the Physical Needs Assessment for each specific developments should be made easily available at that development. Lists of planned and needed repairs and renovations can be made more transparent, and regular meetings to address them which are open to tenants should be organized.

It is clear that residents need to be a more regular part of the conversation with NYCHA management at all levels.

In addition to just conversation, a concrete way for residents to influence decision-making concerning building repairs is needed.

To this end, direct access to specialized technical help, such as construction managers, elevator and plumbing technicians, engineers or architects with development experience, and design professionals would be invaluable. This would help residents understand the root causes of problems at their developments, and gain a sense of the actual capital needs and potential costs of repairs. In turn, this would allow residents to be better positioned to make proposals to NYCHA as well as the local, state, and federal government to secure necessary dollars and execute planned repairs and renovations.